South-East leaders meet Buhari, presents regions’ grievances

It was the kind of send-off that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson would surely love: a packed house and a packed piazza outside for the state funeral of Silvio Berlusconi. AC Milan supporters chanted their longtime president's name after the death this week at 86 of Italy's longest-serving leader since World War II.

Addressing the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed that Russia is more united than ever. The event was Putin's first multilateral summit since a short-lived insurrection.

Find these stories and much more when you grab a copy of The Guardian on Saturday.⁣

A one-day summit by West African leaders from Nigeria, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal and the Niger Republic ended in a stalemate after the leaders met with Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and Muslim Cleric Mahmoud Dicko.

The Nigerien junta has warned its West African neighbors from carrying out a military intervention in the country. Meanwhile, coup supporters attacked the French Embassy amid unrest in Niamey.

While several of Niger's neighbors have vowed to back the junta, the West African bloc ECOWAS has given the leaders one week to end the coup. Meanwhile, hundreds of European nationals have begun evacuating from Niger.

Thousands of pro-coup supporters take to the streets in Niger marking the 63rd anniversary of the country's independence from France, as FRANCE 24 and RFI are banned in the country. We talk to Dr Olayinka Ajala, senior politics lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, about the latest developments. Also, violence in the Sahel flares up again with the slaying of several fishermen in northern Cameroon.

Thousands of pro-coup supporters take to the streets in Niger marking the 63rd anniversary of the country's independence from France, as FRANCE 24 and RFI are banned in the country. We talk to Dr Olayinka Ajala, senior politics lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, about the latest developments. Also, violence in the Sahel flares up again with the slaying of several fishermen in northern Cameroon.

Germany's economy is in decline. Now the main opposition party, the center-right CDU, has presented an emergency program to combat the recession, stepping up pressure on Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

West African leaders have agreed to keep all options, including military force, open to restore civilian rule in Niger. At a crisis ECOWAS summit in neighboring Nigeria, they ordered the deployment of a standby force. However, there are no signs Niger's junta will hand back power.

Find these stories and much more when you grab a copy of The Guardian on Saturday.⁣

'Our leaders can afford to recruit even media executives to do even dirty jobs for them. They can pay hack writers to publish what they would like to read. They now pay dubious ‘media entrepreneurs’ to monitor adversarial reports about them'. On Inside Stuff with Martins Oloja, the multi-award-winning journalist and Editor-in-Chief of The Guardian this week, talks about how leaders recruit the media to monitor editorials on their activities.